The Last Hummer: A 21-gun salute for America's most cynical brand

After you've spent billions establishing a nameplate and gone to all the trouble of finding people who'll buy your car and believe in your brand, it's got to be worth something. Right? After all, you've done all the heavy lifting. Surely someone will want a piece of that action.

Well, apparently not, at least when there's a worldwide depression going on. And especially not when the brand in question is Hummer, not just one of General Motors' worst ideas in modern history, but one of its worst ideas ever. Which is saying a lot.

The brand's frightful lack of current value is evidenced by the parent corporation's announcement this week that following almost two years of trying to peddle Hummer— after a final breakdown in the proposed sale to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. Ltd.—it is finally giving up. No dummies, the Chinese government refused to approve the expenditure of state funds and GM has chosen to wind the marquee, which it bought in 1999, down for good.

So last call for Hummer, folks. If you want to buy a maker of overweight, indifferently assembled, hyper-aggressive SUVs, give General Motors a call—no reasonable offers refused. And if you want to buy one of Hummer's signature land whales, better hurry on down to your local Hummer dealer—that expensive steel-and-glass Quonset hut with the giant 35-foot H out front, the one that GM required dealers to build in order to keep their franchises—and help yourself from lots full of unsold inventory to one of the slowest-selling machines the company has ever offered. From a 2006 sales high of more than 71,000, (peanuts in GM's world) sales steadily decreased to a mere 9,046 units in 2009, and things weren't looking like they were going to get any better anytime soon.

Of course, many dealers wisely defaulted on their franchise agreements suspecting that Hummer's day in the sun would be short-lived. Still, that will be slim comfort to those 153 retailers who kept their franchises open—Quonset Hut and all—and will now see their investment disappear.

Speaking of disappearing, GM is estimated to have lost $10 billion on Hummer since 1999, when it acquired civilian production rights for the brand from the defense contractor AM General, a subsidiary of the shifty Renco, owned by billionaire Hamptonite Ira Rennert. It was a lousy bet that not only distracted the company from the business at hand, but it also doubled down on it's GM's gamble that Americans would want to keep driving oversized four-wheeled fortresses well into the future. It's a bet, of course, that didn't pay off, burning resources that GM's would've been better spent saving the corporation and its once successful divisions from the slide that ended in its larger bankruptcy.

The Humvee, which was the precursor to the Hummer, was first built by defense contractor AM General in 1985 as a replacement for the wildly cheaper and considerably more nimble Jeep. The Humvee was designed to the Pentagon's peculiar 1979 specification, which called for something capable of fording rivers and driving over walls, without regard to the important facts that it would be large, heavy, and thirsty. At 5,200 lbs., under some conditions it couldn't be lifted by a Blackhawk helicopter, and while a Jeep cost Uncle Sam $15,000, a Humvee cost more than $25,000, a figure that would quickly balloon more than 100%. It also went largely unnoticed by the general public until the first Gulf War, the three-week TV spectacular staged in 1991 that served as a rock video for all the over-priced weapons systems whose fate hung in the balance, and in which it featured prominently.

Following its undeserved elevation to icon status on CNN, a civilian version of the Humvee (called the Hummer or H1) was brought to market in 1992. Its maker, AM General, went on to sell about a thousand examples a year, aided by the high-profile endorsement of one Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born body-builder turned thespian who wowed audiences in cinematic classics like Terminator and Kindergarten Cop, before becoming the governor of California. Rennert bought the company, which continues to assemble the H1 for the military, from AM General in 1993.

The civilian Hummer's modest sales figures were never hard to explain. Setting aside the odd rancher or oil-field engineer who might find some conceivable use for a three-and-a-half-ton, slow-as-cement ute with 30" wheels and negligible rearward visibility, it took a special kind of bozo to purchase a Hummer as personal transportation. Anyone who's driven an H1 and lived can testify that it offered one of the worst on-road driving experiences known to man.

In 1999, Rennert, licensed the Hummer name to General Motors. In 2000, after announcing that it intended to sell more than 200,000 Hummers a year, GM presented the first step in its roadmap to volume in the form of the Hummer H2, a smaller model still on dealers' lots today. A smaller but still unwieldy H3, based on GM's mid-sized pickup chassis, was launched in 2005 and was meant to be a bigger seller, with possible audiences in foreign lands where the H2s were still too brawny for the roads.

The Hummer debacle was one of the signature moves of the management team installed by John Smale, who came from Procter & Gamble in 1992 to become GM's president, charged, ironically, with instilling better brand management techniques. Aided by the notably clueless Ron Zarrella, who was plucked from optics maker Bausch & Lomb, in 1994, they publicly committed themselves to firming up GM's eroding market share by re-establishing the increasingly indistinct identities of its core brands, a task which somehow involved defunding Oldsmobile, Saturn, Pontiac and most GM automobile lines in favor of huge investments in seemingly profitable trucks and large SUVs. Smale left in 1995 (staying on GM's board till 2000) with the company's balance sheets bulging from truck profits, but the real fruit of his and Zarrella's labors didn't truly pay dividends until later when the car divisions were sold or closed and the company had slid into bankruptcy.

Surely there is some irony in the realization that our government, who first called for the military Hummer, is now the one, as owner of more than 60% of GM's stock, nominally calling for the brand's closure. Production of the military humvee, still in AM General's hands, continues, though the US military has said they've their last last order .

Personally, I blame Zarrella most, whom I well remember from the H2 press introduction in Times Square in 2001. With then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and a pre-electoral Schwarzenegger by his side, Zarella called Hummer a "marketer's dream.... an automotive icon with high recognition value, a loyal customer base and strong aspirational appeal, particularly among young people, creating another opportunity for GM to connect with younger buyers." Yes all those young people with $45,000 and more to spend on 10 mpg SUVs, where did they go? And if a loyal customer base of 15,000 means so much to GM, I wondered, why did they kill Oldsmobile in 2004, which had several million registered owners?

Beyond Zarrella and the fundamental misguidedness of the whole enterprise, there was the spike in oil prices in 2007, which hit gas-guzzlers hard. But the great, unsung villain in Hummer's demise was the Iraq War. What the father (George H.W.) gave Hummer with the Gulf War, his son (George W.) took away, as years of grinding combat revealed the Hummer H1 to be something less than all-conquering. Far from impervious, as SUV buyers like to suppose their vehicles make them, our troops have, in fact, proved alarmingly mortal when riding in Hummers, most every night on the evening news. The vehicles have turned out to be big, fat targets.

Under different circumstances, GM might have resurrected the brand. And

another firm with very deep pockets still might—arriving at the last

moment (as Spyker did for Saab, but only with more money) as a green

maker of electric 4x4s, for instance.

But perhaps death is the most fitting punishment for Hummer. One regrets the lost jobs and the lost opportunity, but before you get to feeling too sorry for the brand's demise, remember that when they went after civilians with the Hummer, the corporation and its dealers had invested in a machine which unashamedly appealed to the least altruistic, angriest elements of the American motoring public and their psyche. They spent billions promoting a machine that took the SUV's anti-social tendencies to previously uncharted depths. In short, Hummer was a cynical bet on the worst in the American character, and, for once, the cynics lost.

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